Fake news today can be written by anyone with a Facebook page or Twitter account, or by someone with too much time on their living in their parent’s basement. These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous to the politically manipulative. The U.S. government is one of the biggest propagators of fake news, often with the help of the corporate news media.
This is because the powers that be don’t want us to be skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. In recent years, Facebook and Google have appointed themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet to screen out what is blatantly false, spam, or clickbait. This creates a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship by corporate entities known for colluding with the government, as well as a sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control while the so-called mainstream news media has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation.
In the 1950s and 1960s, journalists provided a full range of clandestine services to the CIA, including sharing notebooks and editing staff with the agency. They also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. In August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the early post-9/11 years, the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon to sound the war drums against Iraq, despite a lack of credible data supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, suggests that the reason for the media’s easy acceptance is that too many journalists, including some very famous ones, have surrendered their independence in order to become part of the ruling class. Journalism is the act of speaking the truth to power, not wielding it. This has been reclassified, renamed, and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation, and spin.
In the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq based upon absolute fabrications, the Russo-Ukrainian War, or the ongoing war on terror, privacy, and whistleblowers, it is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media). For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception, and the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency,” alongside land, sea, air, and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division, and corps in the US military has had its own “psyop” element producing output for local media.
The military activity linked to the State Department’s campaign of “public diplomacy” is linked to the use of propaganda disguised as journalism. This use of propaganda disguised as journalism is what journalist John Pilger refers to as the “invisible government.” Media outlets have become propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.
This leaves us with the question of what we should or could do. John Pilger’s words of warning and advice suggest that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. He believes that a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement that monitors deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. Journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of bogus objectivity. The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge out of the underground and bring it to ordinary people.
Wake up people, have you thought about how many hours of your life you wasted watching the fake news with the Russiangate hoax and seeing that pencil neck Adam Shift come on night after night saying, “We are closing in on Trump, we have evidence”. Let’s not forget the Muller probe that became a nothing burger. And you can’t forget Trump Impeachment and Trump Impeachment 2, which were all proven lies by these fake teleprompter-reading nitwits. Oh, and by the way, did your opinion change of the January 6 committee (not ready for a primetime) show after the release of thousands of hours of video was released? If you said yes, then you are being honest with yourself, and that is the first step in healing from years of fake news.
How many times are people going to believe them before they realize they are full of it? Sadly, mainstream journalism and the corporate media are dead, and now there is a form of corporate dictatorship.